After many years of inactivity due to imprisonment, I, Zerstörung, the Goddess of Havoc, return to the Equestrian world, with vengeance (and toying with my enemies) clear on my mind. I didn't realize, however, just what adventure was in store for me.

Micheal Santino is just your average guy. He works as a bouncer in a local pub, lives in a run-down loft in the city, and happens to be a century-old vampire. After an unfortunate turn of events, he finds himself ripped from his world and thrown into

This is my story about dealing with the nut job ponies all in my quest to get their crap over with so I can just nap the days away. All while being a soul trapped in a sword. I don't know how that all fits together but then again I don't really care.

[Rationalfic Deconstruction / Subversion of Displaced]You’ve read the stories of people from Earth being “Displaced”: Their bodies are changed, their minds are warped, and they’re thrown across the multiverse, to whatever world and timeline their supernal "Displacers" decide upon. Well, this story isn’t one of them...

...because when they tried to remake me, I didn’t let them.

A Rationalist Horror story, in which an Occultist from some version of Earth (implied to be the World of Darkness) undermines her own Displacement and ends up as a Self-Modifying Construct. Scientific Inquiry, Philosophical Debate, Rational Discussion, Body Horror, and Existential Hijinks ensue. Themes, Concepts, and Style inspired by HP Lovecraft, Elizer Yudkowsky, Gordon R Dickson, Edgar Allen Poe, Modern Prometheus (Frankenstein), Dresden Codak, World of Darkness, and Friendship is Optimal.Front page on JUL 28th, AUG 12th, OCT 30, and every update after that.

Your story breaks the shitty norm that most displaced stories have in common by being an 'actually interesting story' instead of a powertrip for a horny teen.

This is like brain porn. My head hurts but in a good way.

Author’s Notes

I often find Displaced fics to be more often Miss than Hit with me. Often, they're generic, poorly written, or just do not do anything worth reading with the concept. This is an experiment to see if I can come up with some advice for those authors, while trying out a few other concepts which aren’t used often, even by me, including some which directly subvert Displaced as a genre. This is also a crossover with the upcoming Dragon: The Oroboroi Chronicles, a World of Darkness rulebook which I lead the development team for.

I hope you all enjoy this, and I implore you to leave some feedback in the comments section: I'll experimenting with a few uncommon concepts here, and I'd like to know how people feel about how they're coming across. :3

FAQ

Because people keep bringing these things up...

Horror/Dark Tags

I've had multiple people ask "how bad does it get?" Note the lack of the "gore", "sad", or "mature" tags or anything like that. Yes, there is blood and death at some point in this story, but the real horror of this story comes from the philosophical and scientific quandaries the characters go through: this is "intellectual horror", not "visceral horror".

Length

In the interest of this NOT becoming one of those long, sprawling fics, I plan to keep this limited to a manageable 10 chapter limit, not counting Prologue and Epilogue. No one wants to read something that long, and I'd rather not be stressing over this 6 months from now.

Sequel

The Sequel is already in the works, with scenes already written. It will be a more episodic story revolving around world optimization and interplanar hijinks.

Crossovers

To be clear, I do plan on having the main character make one of those "Token" things, but as they often get in the way of actual stories, that won't happen until the end of the story. The Sequel will be crossover-heavy.

8324454Eh, makes sense: the things litter the site and most of them are just... not... good...

...However, I wrote this for fun, not to be some grand awesome thing. It's a rationalfic of Displaced. Who actually wants to read that?

It's not even that it bothers me to get downvoted, seeing as I know the writing is good, but it's just a bit odd that I'd write something no one's written before, as far as I know, and people downvote the title...

8324459Umm... I just refreshed the page to make sure, but I'm still not seeing any votes either way. Not that I'm doubting you or anything, I'd honestly be shocked if some asshole didn't just go "Oh, a new Displaced fic? Better shit on it immediately without even reading it.".

It's so common nowadays that I wouldn't be surprised if it became a meme...

8324469Chapter 1 tries to explain that she tried to stop the magic that was Displacing her, making her into a formless creature of pure thought and magic. Chapter 3, where she narrates again, will have more details on this. Basically, she's a living thought construct, and the idea is that this is what would happen if you displaced a Hedge Witch from the World of Darkness.

8324482That's a nice idea. i'm guessing this story will be focusing on the main character, no cross-overs? If so, that's also a grand idea mostly due to there are people who hate cross-overs as it does tend to derail the plot if there's too many.

“Language? Twilight, there’s a fucking ALIEN trying to TURN INTO you, and you’re worried about the words coming out of my mouth?? TWILIGHT, WE ARE IN A REAL-LIFE HORROR STORY! You need to get your priorities straight!”

8324503It's fine, as long as you read it. (and the bit about tokens was added after the mods cleared it)

THIS story will have no crossovers, other than World of Darkness and MLP. The SEQUEL will downright REVOLVE around the Displaced Crossovers. I don't like the crossovers myself, as they tend to, as you said, derail everything when I just want to know how this person deals with being turned into a fantasy character in Equestria. The whole "Token" thing has always seemed corny to me too: how do they just know how to make them? That whole thing's getting subverted in this story, mainly on the basis that the main character of this is, herself, a direct product of trope-subversion.

83244898324470It's been there since like, 2 minutes after the mods approved the story. I think the servers don't sync the votes or something, because there's definitely one there for me... Like I said, it's not a big deal: I wrote this for me, not to be in the featured box or something, so it doesn't really hurt me if someone doesn't like the title...

Curious... tracking.I'm gonna give a like, just to not let it drown in all the hate it might get,The start is... kinda... i don't know, forced? I just don't know how to describe it, but ignoring that, chapter 3 got me really intrigued, if this continues in the same direction, it's one of those good things that unfortunately never gets updated... or it goes to shit on chapter 6-7, time will tell i suppose.But it was a good starting point, keep it up.

8324640Glad to hear you're interested, I'll try and be interesting! You're right about the start being forced: I have more ideas for the middle and late story and, rather than taking this seriously (because, let's be fair, Displaced fics aren't exactly pullitzer material), I just sort of tossed that together. ...Maybe I'll go back and revise it later... if I have better ideas...

And as for it not being updated... I actually already wrote out the entire story in outline format, so hopefully I'll just keep in the habit of writing it. I find this is just as good as reading pony fiction when I need to get my head off of something else... I plan for this to be less than 10 chapters long anyway. (once again, it's Displaced)

8324823Oh it's nothing to utilize, I assure you. It's just a matter of the style not bring for me despite it being great for other people. Such as my style not gelling with others. If anything, it's admirable that there can be so many different manners of flow, style, and story telling elements that do many people can enjoy. That's all I'm getting at.

Nice. You'd get an upvote from me just on the basis of the character being female (most Displaced are not), and on the originality of having a human who's an actual mage end up as one of the Displaced, but the fact that you're screwing with the basic concept of Displaced intrigues me.

I will say... however... that you... have too many... ellipses... it's a common problem... among less experienced writers... you ought to see... how many I had... in some of my old stuff... so maybe... you should tone that down... unless the narrator... is William Shatner...

8324969OMG. Alara J Rogers, one of my favorite authors on the site, likes my stupid horse fanfiction, and I haven't even had the part where Last Draconequs Discord shows up. I can die happy.

The ellipses were more of a stylistic choice, because she really doesn't know what's going on at this point, but I'll keep that in mind that, yeah, now that someone brings it up, I'm using them more than I should.

8325110Decapitating all the Death Eaters at once with a carbon fiber thread. Oh wait, I just killed my best friend's dad whoospiiieee!

No, to be serious, the main character is a scientist who just gained the ability to affect things on a level of pure concept. This story will have a large amount of discussion of science, philosophy, psychology, the occult, and ethics as it goes on. I've already halfway written the part where Meta explains to her displacer that no, he can't be a god, because there are no gods, yadda yadda yadda. That's gonna be a fun part. Also, the fact that she hasn't realized it yet, but she's basically a shoggoth means more fun times ahead.

If you still have a body, I should probably apologize for how confusing this all probably is for you: I really don’t have a frame of reference to what it’s like to have one anymore. I mean, have you ever looked at your own mind, and seen the very thoughts you were thinking as you thought them? Let me tell you, it is a very interesting experience, and one which quickly became second nature to me in that infant state where I had developed too little understanding of things to realize the strangeness of it all.

I remembered reading several informed sources explaining to me that feelings are a set of instincts which are meant to influence the brain in a drastic situation. Fear prevents us from harming ourselves, happiness is a reward response, anger is a defense mechanism. When attempting to use higher level cognition, to practice rationality and scientific thought, however, they got in the way. You see, there are these things called cognitive biases, which are when the emotional instincts humans developed as chimpanzees actually prevent them from understanding reality as it is.

832566783257888325792Well, glad to hear Y'all are stickin' around, because I'll either be posting Chapter 3 before bed tonight or tomorrow. Chapter 3 will stop with the 3rd-person Twi-Twi PoV and go back to the general first-person main-character PoV format that I'd like to keep to, and so far I've pretty much gone full rationalfic by halfway through it.

8327498Heh, I dunno if I really meant much more than a passing giggle by naming her Marilyn Susan, but yeah, she's gonna pull some shit starting in the chapter I'm still working on... so... Check back in a couple hours!

8324450Either they don't like you, they don't like the universe, or they didn't give you the chance to provide subversion. In my experience, it's usually the first one. I think it's the last two in your case. Their loss, right?